Friday, April 30, 2010

Remember how about two years ago I put advertisements on my website, in order to grow fabulously wealthy, and then I was like "IT'S OK I"LL GIVE YOU GUYS SOME OF MY RICHES" and decided I would do it with a contest? No? You don't remember? Ask your grandparents, they may be old enough to remember.

Anyway, now it is thousands of years later and I have finally gotten around to picking some finalists! YES.

First off, I was surprised by how many of the entries referred specifically to xkcd sucking. i made the requirements of the contest really broad, and I was expecting more general, non-xkcdsucks specific humor. That said, most of the good ones were in this category, so you'll see it well represented in the four finalists.

Remember, one of these four fine people will win a $100 TopatoCo gift certificate and two others will win $20 ones. One of them will win nothing. OH WELL. I could have made some more finalists, so that more people would feel bad about losing together, or fewer, so that every finalist would win something, but hey, look at that, I didn't.

To vote, send me an e-mail with the subject line "I KNOW A WINNER WHEN I SEE ONE, AND {blank} IS A WINNER" with the {blank} replaced by the name, as written above, of the person you want to vote for. So if you wanted Imaginary Finalist Bill to win, you'd e-mail me with "I KNOW A WINNER WHEN I SEE ONE, AND BILL IN A WINNER" and then your vote will be counted by the magical monkeys at gmail. Put whatever you want in the actual e-mail, i maybe won't read those.

You can certainly vote for yourself, tell your friends to vote for you, etc. You have till next sunday (may 9th, 2010) at midnight to vote. I'll announce winners soon after that, unless it turns out again that i am a terrible liar.

ALSO, I should mention some folks who came close but didn't make the cut - they win nothing but eternal fame and glory (but no money or anything):

Edison, for this,David, for this.Anonymous, for this. [this was not posted on the official contest page, plus i don't know who wrote it. otherwise it would have been a finalist. SUCKS TO BE YOU, anon!]

Also, the single worst comic entered was this one, from an anon who thought it was so good he posted it twice!

The time travel one by Anonymous is fantastic. But from the winners, i'd have to say "WE GET IT" by Fred is the best. The rock-climbing one is funny, but I prefer the ones that make fun of xkcd. the other two are too long, I can't even be bothered to read them.

I kinda wish there was more that weren't just making fun of xkcd. Not that the ones that do aren't funny, it just seems like they should've been more about genuinely making the comic better, like the Facebook one.

I don't like the rock climbing one at all. The original just stops at the fourth panel, doesn't it? If so, this one is effectively just the same twist made a second time. Does copying Randall's joke really count as an improvement?

I know there's now the element of "you're less impressive because I can do THIS," but I don't think that cuts it.

I think people have already summarized my thoughts on Walker's and Dan's (though I did read them). Of the finalists, Fred's was the best, though I liked Edison's and the first anon better. This is a vote for Fred.

No, I couldn't be bothered to send it to your inbox, Carl. Don't count it if you don't want to...

I like the concept of the new comic. Kids taking pretend too far in regards to the floor being lava -- ok, I could see the humor in that. My problem with it is the lack of consistency in their actions as compared to this concept.

The whole joke hinges on them overresponding. Except for the first guy, who apparently, off-panel, blew up the kitchen, the other two are doing relatively kid-like things (albeit the hose is bratty and damaging, but not exactly ridiculous to the extent of being funny). So, we've got 1 kid _maybe_ being ridiculous, one kid being a major brat, and one kid just being a kid. Just makes the joke fall on its face.

Overthought the shit out of that one didn't you Volt? I Don't even really agree with it as you put it anyway because one of them is actually trying to convince authorities to send helicopters and one time actually succeeded in making their county a no-fly-zone. That's more than your average prank. I really liked this one, unlike the last several in a row.

How do you know he's trying to convince authorities? Looks like a kid talking into a fake walkie-talkie to me, and we certainly don't have any particular reason to believe otherwise.

As far as the alt-text goes, meh. I guess it helps? But I rarely let the alt-text overly affect my feeling about the comic strip itself. Again, I didn't say I hated this one, just that I thought it was a little off.

... the alt text needs to use a different word other than grounded... because of the refernce to the FAA, I read it as they were on a plane which got grounded because of... then after re-reading it a few times, I realized it was the kids who were repremanded (I wouldn't use that word either, but something other than grounded would work better).

I also naturally assumed the kid on the right was pretending to talk into a walkie talkie, rather than on the telephone with the authorities...

but ah well...

I think it'll be a close one between Jason and the Anonymous who didn't post a name and is thus excluded from the competition... as those two were the ones that seemed the best executed in my opinion... :D

Perhaps once this contest is over, you could add a page to the site which is basically along the lines of "favourites", where people can "upvote/downvote" XKCD comics, and thus any person visiting the site can get a quick look at everyone's most and least favourite comics!

Not only was today's xkcd funny, it also had above average art by the comic's standards. The splash looks cool, and the setting is clearly established.My only complaint is the use of the term "we" when everybody looks the same. Who the people are is a little confusing. (Is it Randall and his previously unknown twin brothers?)

IQ is explicitly designed to follow a bell curve - 100 is the mean and I think the standard deviation is meant to be 20. That's why, as Nathan says, average IQ would only remain 100 if we were to recalibrate the test with the passage of time (to fit the raw scores onto this bell curve).

IQ is not a test, though. IQ is just IQ, and the mean is always 100. Yes, methods of testing the IQ would need to be recalibrated if the average intelligence of the population suddenly changed significantly, however the point is that your IQ is not your result on an IQ test. No IQ test can perfectly assess your IQ anyway, all they can do is approximate. So while the average IQ testing score of everyone may not end up changing (and probably wouldn't be exactly 100 anyway) the average IQ will always remain at 100.

It's funny how the last strip in Way Walker's one is EXACTLY the kind of thing Carl would bitch about if it was posted on xkcd. "Oh wow, making fun of how a company name sounds like a sexual word, that's not funny, what a repeated joke, he's done that joke so many times, I've seen that joke a million times in other places, how unoriginal, how obvious, my dog could write a better joke than that, wank wank wank, bullshit bullshit bullshit etc."

But, put it in the context of a competition to show how much xkcd sucks, and suddenly it not only wins finalist, but nobody in the comments even points out what an obvious, tired, over-player joke it is.

An irony that is also a particularly apt display of the general worth of this site and the people on it, I'd say.

In addition to what Mole said, the fact that the vulva question is so dumb is actually part of what the joke depends on. A shaggy dog story isn't a shaggy dog story if the payoff is something that lives up to your expectations. It has to be a big long build-up for a sudden letdown.

Taking that epic journey and building up that much to ask an actually relevant or interesting question would make for an entirely different story, one that would likely be some sort of serious commentary rather than making a joke.

But breaking through windows and sailing the seas and traversing frozen wastes and hot-air ballooning and facing down guards with katanas... just to ask that stupid-ass vulva question? That's even better than Nate and the lever.

Randall, on the other hand, either thought the joke was just fine on its own, or he sucks at shaggy dog stories. Just SAYING "I've come so far" is not enough buildup at all. Way Walker's shows rather than tells.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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